A Past Lives episode reconstructs the story of Asana, a young Scythian priestess whose mummified remains, known as the Siberian Ice Maiden, were found preserved in the Altai Mountains permafrost. The narrative imagines her final days, tracing how illness, a riding accident and her role as a spiritual diviner led her to the high plateau where she died roughly 2,500 years ago. The piece situates her individual story within the broader Scythian nomadic world of the Eurasian steppe.
Developer ori has released a very early, buggy preview of GEFS—a crash-safe, snapshotting, copy-on-write filesystem originally built for Plan 9's 9front—running on OpenBSD. The port, under 9,000 lines of kernel code, is not intended for production use, with data loss expected especially during error conditions, and is not being proposed for inclusion in the OpenBSD tree yet.
Meta introduced Meta One, a new subscription service spanning Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp that bundles AI tools for image and video creation alongside existing premium features. The offering includes a $7.99/month Core tier and a $19.99/month Premium tier, both incorporating the previously launched Facebook Plus, Instagram Plus and WhatsApp Plus perks, with Premium offering greater AI usage allowances. Meta declined to specify exact usage caps, saying they vary by country and system conditions.
The EPA finalized a rule dismantling most of the 2024 Carbon Pollution Standards for power plants, claiming the Clean Air Act doesn't authorize requiring pollution control technology it deems unproven. The agency also proposed eliminating all remaining greenhouse gas emissions requirements for power plants, asserting their emissions have no meaningful climate impact.
The Trump administration's EPA, led by Lee Zeldin, has finalized plans to eliminate federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions from coal and natural gas power plants, rolling back rules established under the Biden and Obama administrations. A companion rule would also try to block future administrations from reinstating such restrictions on power plant emissions.
A new tool called Ordewell breaks down a single stated goal into an ordered sequence of coding-agent tasks, each assigned its own runner, model, thinking effort and execution mode. Users can edit the plan before execution—reordering, adding, removing or rewiring dependencies—without losing finished work or restarting the AI conversation. Task completion is verified by checking for a unique marker in the runner's output rather than trusting the model's self-reported success.
Planted, a startup that uses digital-twin software and robots to redesign and build solar farms, has raised $31.8 million led by Piva Capital and RA Capital Management Planetary Health, with backing from Google, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Gigascale Capital, and Khosla Ventures. The company's technology helped one St. Louis-area project cut land use by 40% while producing the same power output, resolving a zoning dispute that had stalled the development.
The Trump administration's Environmental Protection Agency has proposed eliminating federal restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from coal- and oil-fired power plants. The agency's filing goes further than a simple rollback, seemingly inviting judges to rule that the EPA lacks authority to regulate such emissions from the power sector at all in the future.
The EPA is seeking to rescind a Biden-era rule requiring power plants to cut most greenhouse gas emissions by 2039 or shut down. It is also arguing that the agency lacks authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate such emissions, claiming without scientific support that they pose no threat to public health or the environment.
The Environmental Protection Agency unveiled a plan to eliminate remaining federal limits on greenhouse gas emissions from power plants, finalizing the repeal of Biden-era rules and proposing removal of related emissions standards. The agency argues climate pollution's health impacts are too diffuse to regulate, even as electricity demand rises from AI, EVs, and manufacturing growth.
PostgreSQL takes a weak AccessShareLock on a table and every one of its indexes each time it plans a query, even indexes the plan doesn't end up using. Through version 17, each backend can only record 16 such locks in a private fast-path array before overflowing into the shared lock table, which is guarded by 16 LWLock partitions that become contention points under heavy concurrent load.
A researcher stress-tested Meta Muse, the personal AI agent Meta launched on September 8, 2026, by asking it to spawn 120 subagents simultaneously through the exposed subagent.spawn interface. Only 33 of the 120 calls successfully created an agent, while the remaining 87 failed, and durable trace data showed six database lock timeouts during the process. The author later added clarifications and outside architectural context but did not alter the underlying experimental data.
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